Watch what happens under your skin when a mosquito chooses you for a snack

The idea of a mosquito feeding on me is creepy enough, even when my impression of what was happening was just them sticking their proboscis in me like a straw. Now, though, a team of researchers from the Institut Pasteur in Paris have recorded what really happens underneath the skin, and it has turned out to be far, far more creepy in reality.

So, the mosquito's proboscis isn't just a stiff hollow tube. It's flexible, and the mosquito goes rooting around under your skin until it locates a vein to tap into!

If that wasn't enough, the proboscis actually has multiple parts that can fan out, independently, to search for blood!

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I once (jokingly) asked a friend of mine who was studying entomology if we could just exterminate the mosquito off the face of the Earth. She said that too many other species depended on them for food.

I don't know. I'm all for conservation and preservation of species, and I'm always concerned about the effects we have on the ecosystem, but the facts that the feed on us and spread disease is bad enough. With this added evidence, extermination still doesn't sound like that bad of an idea.

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